I came across two interesting and very different posts today.
The first
33 Website Success Metrics Instead of Rankings, Google PageRank and Traffic dismisses ranking as a KPI against a wide variety of other metrics, e.g bounce rate, backlinks, alexa rank, delicious bookmarks, tweets, and Technorati mentions.
The other is a great analysis of the 3 gigs or so of data that AOL released into the wild (briefly) a while back, showing the clickthrough rate per rank
Serp clickthrough rates.
In brief, the no. 1 site got 42% of the clicks, the no. 2 site got 12%, the no. 3 site got 8% - you get the picture.
Anything ranking below 10 gets the scraps.
Now I would never argue that a sites ranking is the be all and end of of success, but you’ve got to be at least in the game to get anywhere, and while I think that some social media activity is healthy for most sites, being found in Google is still up there with the top priorities for any serious website.
RSS
August 27th, 2008 at 2:12 pm
So you really, really want to rank high for your phrases, don’t you!
August 28th, 2008 at 9:14 am
Nice analysis. Do you think that the importance of the social sites will increase over time or not?
September 12th, 2008 at 11:43 am
>Do you think that the importance of the social sites will increase over time or not?
Yes, but they aren’t the be all and end all that some think!